In many surface mining and earthmoving operations, an excavating shovel or front-end loader is used to excavate waste material. These machines provide a discontinuous flow of excavated material by means of the discrete loads discharged from their bucket or dipper at the end of every cycle. The waste material must then often be dumped at a location that is further from the excavated face than the dumping reach of the excavator. Methods currently used to achieve this remote dumping include use of haul trucks, employing the excavator itself to re-handle the waste, or loading the waste onto a conveyor system. However, when the excavated waste contains rocks that are too large for safe and reliable transport on a conveyor, a conveyor may only be used if the oversized rocks are first screened out of the stream, or else crushed to a conveyable size. In other cases, the waste may be too wet, sticky or abrasive to be successfully carried by a conveyor.
When the distance to the dump location is of the order of two or three hundred feet, the methods described above may be expensive, or may have other negative impacts such as diverting the excavator from advancing the excavation, or consuming fossil fuels in wheeled vehicles.